The Ending Of Awareness Explained
"Awareness" is a new Spanish-American sci-fi thriller released on Amazon Prime. On the surface, it's easy to see why many are making comparisons to "The Matrix," with its dark visuals, high-speed martial arts fights, and a story centered on a chosen one who could turn the tide in a war that no one realizes is even being waged. But beyond those rather superficial similarities, "Awareness" has its own story to tell.
In "Awareness," we meet a young man named Ian (Carlos Scholz), but unlike Neo in "The Matrix," he's very well aware of the powers he possesses. Though he and his father use those powers for selfish ends just to get by, revelations about Ian's past and where his powers come from threaten to tear apart what meager life they have. And when he's tracked down by an enigmatic agent with her own agenda, it exposes a hidden world of assassins and a vast conspiracy that could undermine global events.
With a complex story that's sometimes tough to follow, "Awareness" boasts plot twists and reversals that can confuse as often as they amaze. Plus the answers that the ending offers up aren't so cut-and-dried. So get ready to open your eyes to the ending of "Awareness."
What you need to remember about the plot of Awareness
When we first meet Ian, he's living off the grid and using an incredible psychic power to steal food to live. That power allows him to create illusions in the minds of others that seem like completely convincing realities. His father Vicente (Pedro Alonso) urges him to keep the use of his abilities to a minimum, never wanting to attract attention, in an effort to keep them safe. Still, Ian dreams of a better, more exciting life.
Ian gets that excitement when he's captured by a mysterious agent named Adriana (Lela Loren), who tells him that she works for a group called the Agency. Her team is at war with the Awareness, a clandestine organization who have used people with Ian's ability to manipulate world events to their choosing. Adriana wants Ian to join them, but won't force him, even as a diabolical figure known as the Perceptor (Óscar Jaenada) hunts them both. This Perceptor has Ian's powers too, and it's not clear which side he's on, if any.
Just as Adriana thinks she's convinced Ian to join the Agency, a double agent named Ester (María Pedraza) helps Ian escape past a room full of heavily armed gunmen. Together, they plan to track down Kominski, a man who they believe could be the key to unraveling the truth behind Ian's powers — and the war between the Agency and the Awareness.
The true villain in Awareness is revealed
"Awareness" tells a complicated but also intentionally misleading story, never giving audiences enough information to know who can be trusted, and especially who the antagonist really is. When we first meet the Perceptor, it seems he is a villain, chasing Ian through a nightclub. But a twist midway through reveals that he's actually Ian's biological father, and that Vicente had kidnapped Ian as a child. It's a stunning revelation that makes us question all that we know. Coupled with the realization that Vicente once worked for the Agency, the Perceptor would appear to be a force for good, out to protect Ian and save him from being manipulated.
That, however, is not the case at all. In the end, we learn that the Perceptor has been searching for Ian for years, and wants to use him in the Awareness' scheme to control the world. He knows that Ian's power is unique and special, and he uses his biological connection to Ian to convince him that he is on the right side. The Agency's Adriana, meanwhile, wants only to balance the scales, and is sincere when she tells Ian that she won't force him to join them.
Unfortunately, it isn't easy for Ian to see the truth. He'll need to fight every instinct he has and have a final psychic talk with Vicente, the man he's called father all his life. He'll have to decide who to trust, which isn't easy when reality and illusion are impossible to tell apart.
What happens at the end of Awareness?
Pulled in different directions by a number of competing factions and individuals, Ian finally believes he knows the truth when the Perceptor reveals that he is Ian's father. His companion Ester — whom he has come to trust — is revealed to be working with the Perceptor, and together they visit his long-lost mother Urzula, who he remembers only in dreams. Urzula, though, has been mutilated — apparently at the hands of the Agency — and when Adriana and her henchmen arrive, Ian's ready to use his powers to kill them all.
Just as Ian is about to execute Adriana and her men, though, Vicente shows himself, begging him not to do it. And when Ian wavers, the Perceptor — Ian's real father — uses his own powers to force Vicente to shoot himself, mortally wounding him. Before Vicente dies, Ian is able to use his psychic power to enter his surrogate father's mind and learn the truth about his past, realizing that the Perceptor is the real villain.
In a final confrontation, Ian kills the Perceptor, who had taken Ester hostage at gunpoint. In the aftermath, Adriana makes it clear that while the Perceptor may be dead, the war with the Awareness is far from over and they desperately need Ian's help to win it.
How a memory ties it all together
The secrets of Ian's own past are teased throughout "Awareness," and by the end there are still plenty of unanswered questions. But the biggest ones are resolved, as the recurring flashbacks of Ian's mother Urzula are explained as more than just memories: they include key information about the origins of Ian's powers that only she knew. She left them in an implanted fragment of a memory that only Ian could find, keeping them even from her husband, the Perceptor.
As revealed in the ending, Urzula had been held by the Agency, with Adriana hoping to learn the secret to their powers as well. But when Urzula learned that her husband, the Perceptor, was coming to steal their infant son Ian for his own twisted agenda, she begged a low-level Agency technician named Vicente to take Ian away and keep him safe. Vicente did just that, and when the Perceptor arrived, he abducted his wife and used his powers to dissect her mind in an effort to get the information he needed to create more people like him.
Vicente, meanwhile, spirited Ian away and sacrificed his entire life to keep him alive and out of the hands of both the Agency and the Awareness.
What the ending of Awareness really means
"Awareness" weaves a complicated story, but it's about much more than a young man with extraordinary powers who is hunted by two rival organizations. Themes of power and control permeate the film, as Adriana explains that the Awareness is manipulating world events based on their own whims. The question the movie repeatedly asks is, "Who really has the power, and do they really have our best interests at heart?"
While the film doesn't answer this question — or even try to — it does force us to wonder who is really in control. Sometimes, the movie tells us, it's hard to tell who is good and who is bad, and things may not even be as black and white as that. A more concrete lesson we can take away, though, is that of what parenthood really means.
As embodied by the Perceptor (Ian's biological father) and Vicente (the father who raised him), the film examines parenthood more than you might expect. For Ian, his true parent is the one who raised him and cared for him, even if he isn't related by blood. A parent — biological or not — is best determined by intention and action, not by biology.
How do the powers of perceptors really work?
The first major action scene in "Awareness" sees Ian using his mind-altering powers to help his father Vicente steal some bottles of wine. He creates an illusion in the mind of the store clerk so that she doesn't see the bottles stuffed in Vicente's jacket. But when Ian loses sight of the clerk, the illusion shatters and they're caught. It would seem that Ian has to stay in direct visual contact with a person in order to maintain the projected illusion. But this may only be because of his relative inexperience with his powers.
Creating illusions, though, is only part of Ian's power, because Adriana also helps him learn how to tap into a person's mind and explore their memories. Adriana knows this because she's spent years at the Agency studying Ian's mother Urzula. She also tells Ian of another part of his powers that he is never able to master, which she calls a projected loop.
With this power, a Perceptor can create an illusion that stays with the person, perhaps forever, without them realizing it. Adriana uses a fly as an example: once projected, the fly would follow the person even after the perceptor left them, indefinitely, and the person would never even know that the fly wasn't real. While Ian is never able to learn how to project a loop, the ability plays a part in one of the movie's most jaw-dropping twists.
The history of the perceptors, the Agency, and the Awareness
For most of "Awareness," we're not told how or why Ian has his incredible psychic powers. With the ability to create illusions in the minds of others — and later learning that he can enter people's minds and probe their memories — we don't know whether he was born this way or was the product of some kind of government experiment. But when he finally meets the Perceptor, we get some real answers about where his powers come from.
According to the Perceptor, the powers Ian possesses were developed by a secret government program at the outset of the Cold War, run by a man named Kominski. Using a special formula that he created, Kominski granted these powers to volunteer agents, making them the perfect spies. But when the Cold War ended, many feared these "perceptors" would go rogue. So each agent possessing these powers was hunted down and eliminated in an event called the Disinfection.
The Perceptor and his wife managed to get out alive, but only because of the emergence of The Mule, a mysterious psychic agent, more deadly than any other, and rumored to possess an even greater ability — a Third Power. Some don't believe he exists at all, but by the end of "Awareness," we know that The Mule is very real.
Who is the Mule and what is the Third Power?
Adriana name-drops The Mule and The Third Power in a brief discussion with her boss at the Agency, but it's not until the end of the film that we learn who and what they are. Because the Mule — a powerful, almost mythical psychic agent — is very real, and he does indeed possess an incredible Third Power hitherto unseen.
In a twist some may see coming, it's revealed that Ian's biological father, the Perceptor, is the Mule. In addition to being able to create convincing projections of a false reality and enter people's minds, he also possesses the ability to take direct control of other people's bodies and minds and manipulate them like a puppet. In the film's shocking climax, Ian is so overcome with rage at seeing his mother mutilated that he instinctively reaches out and uses this power, too, forcing Adriana to put a gun in her own mouth and threatening to make her pull the trigger.
The most eye-popping use of the Third Power, though, comes in the film's final showdown, when Ian attempts to stop the Perceptor. With Ester as a hostage, the Perceptor mind-controls a group of innocent bystanders to serve as his personal army, who fight hand-to-hand with Ian, before the latter uses his own abilities to defeat them.
Why is Ian so important?
From the moment we meet her, Adriana talks of a coming war between the Agency and the Awareness. She's desperate to get Ian to join the Agency, because not only will his powers be of great use to them, but it will prevent him from joining the enemy. Both sides are after Ian for his powers, but Ian's importance in the impending conflagration goes far beyond his ability to cast illusions, though we don't find out why until the very end.
After meeting his mother, Ian is told the truth by the Perceptor. He isn't just a man with powers; he is the first person ever born to two perceptors, as they were all sterilized when they joined the program, making him the only super-powered human who has his abilities naturally. How Urzula was able to get pregnant by her husband is never explained, but both the Agency and the Awareness believe Ian's DNA could be key to recreating the formula and producing more perceptors.
But it goes even further than that. The information hidden in the memory implanted by his mother is the formula itself, created by Kominski — who is revealed to be Ian's biological grandfather. Even the Perceptor couldn't break through the walls in Urzula's mind to obtain the formula, so Ian is the last chance he has of getting his hands on it.
Ester's big secret
Early in the film, Ian is captured by Adriana and held prisoner. But an apparent Agency agent named Ester helps bust him out and later says she's an undercover mole really working for the Awareness. Ester is the first encounter Ian has with anyone from the other side, and helps convince him that it's really the Agency that's his enemy.
In the film's final scenes, though, we learn a shocking truth: Ester isn't real. When the Perceptor is holding Ester hostage, Adriana joins the fray and insists to Ian that Ester isn't there. Only Ian can see her. That's because the Perceptor placed a loop in Ian's head during their first encounter, creating Ester from images on the nightclub wall; A vision of a gentle, attractive woman who could help recruit him into the Awareness.
That Ester isn't real explains her encouraging Ian to rob a bank partway through the film. This was something Ian had always wanted to do, but Vicente had forbidden, demonstrating that Ester was actually part of his own subconscious. The movie closes with Ian and Ester together, now embarking on a strange illusory romantic relationship, even though he knows that she's just a figment of his imagination.
What Pedro Alonso had to say about the ending of Awareness
Ian's surrogate father Vicente is played by actor Pedro Alonso, who is probably best known in his native Spain for the crime drama series "Money Heist" and the 2018 film "Berlin." In "Awareness," Alonso plays a seemingly good-hearted man working for a shadowy organization who decides to leave it all behind for the sake of an innocent child. At the end of the film, as he lies dying, Vicente explains that he's given up everything for Ian, demonstrating that he is Ian's true father, and that love is stronger than blood. Yet he also regrets only giving his son a mere life of survival, and not permitting him to truly live.
It's this tragic element to Vicente and his love for Ian that resonated with Alonso, who spoke about the role and what it meant to him with Digital Spy. "The material I was working with was very dense: love and a toxic overprotection," the actor said. But he also noted that, as noble as Vicente could be, he isn't totally innocent. "He also ends up being someone who manipulates [Ian] ... That was cool to me."
What the cast and crew said about the themes of Awareness
In the same interview with Digital Spy, Alonso spoke about what the movie says about power, and not just psychic abilities. "If there is a great theme here, something that turns us all around and makes us dance, that's power," he explained. "What generates power, what implies holding power, and how it connects with your own gifts and talent." The movie's story of two secret organizations vying for control of entire governments is a commentary on who really has power — and it isn't always who we think.
Director David Benmayor told Focus on Film that audiences will be able to glean the movie's message even through all the action and special effects. "There are several layers of the film which have to do with the messages of manipulation of power, of control over other people," he said. That manipulation of power comes full circle in the film's open-ended final scene. Adriana confers with her superior, noting that she still believes that Ian will join them in the coming war. Even though she purports to be on the side of the angels, it's clear that she too is manipulating Ian in her own subtle ways.
Will there be a sequel to Awareness?
While the action-packed ending of "Awareness" wraps up all of the film's most important plot points, there's a lot left on the table to explore in a sequel. The ending makes clear that writer-director David Benmayor is definitely eyeing a second movie. While Ian doesn't join the Awareness, and rebuffs Adriana's invitation to join the Agency, he tells her that he'll be in touch. But he's also very aware that she's not entirely on the level, and there may be a greater scheme at play.
While there hasn't been any concrete talk of a sequel yet, a follow-up seems inevitable should "Awareness" be a hit. Not only is there an impending conflict between the Agency and the Awareness, but there are also a lot of unresolved questions. Even some of the first film's answers could be rewritten: most of the backstory was provided by the Perceptor, who isn't exactly a reliable narrator. He's already lied about his true nature, and there's no telling what else he could have been hiding. He may not even be truly dead, considering his power to cast illusions and control people's minds.
There's also plenty of character drama to explore in a sequel too, especially with Ian accepting that his new lover isn't real and continuing to live with her by his side. What could this mean for his fragile psyche, and how might that affect his powers? Could her very existence be a clue that the Perceptor lives? Only time will tell.